Predator ‘murdered schoolgirls in 1986’

A CONVICTED sex predator has gone on trial for the second time for molesting and strangling two schoolgirls in a woodland den 32 years ago.

Nine-year-olds Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway went missing while out playing near their home in Brighton, East Sussex, on October 9, 1986.

A massive police search led to the “grim discovery” of the friends’ bodies the next day, in a clearing in Wild Park, on the South Downs about half a mile from their homes.

Local roofer Russell Bishop, then 20, was charged with their murders but was cleared after a trial at Lewes Crown Court in 1987.

Within three years of his acquittal, Bishop kidnapped, indecently assaulted and tried to kill a seven-year-old girl in Brighton.

The child was able to identify her attacker and Bishop was convicted following another Lewes trial in 1990.

Prosecutor Brian Altman QC told the Old Bailey that Bishop’s earlier acquittal was quashed at the Court of Appeal in light of new evidence following advances in DNA testing.

The girls’ families, including Karen’s mother Michelle Hadaway, sat in court for the start of Bishop’s second trial for the murders.

Mr Altman said: “Thirty-two years ago, almost to the day, on Friday, October 10, 1986, two nine-year-old girls, Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway, were found dead in the woods at Wild Park in Brighton.

“Both had gone missing the evening before, and, despite searches by police and public, they were not to be found until the following afternoon.

“That grim discovery led to the largest and longest-running police inquiry Sussex Police has ever known.

“The killings were entirely intentional and they were carried out in the woods by a man who sexually assaulted them for his own gratification. That man, say the prosecution, was this defendant, Russell Bishop.

“Evidence of the re-evaluation of the science available at the time of the original trial and new science, we suggest, proves that Russell Bishop was, to the exclusion of anyone else, responsible for the murders of the two little girls.”

He said the motive for the murders was “sexual and paedophilic”.

Similarities between the 1990 attack and the 1986 killings, together with other “compelling and powerful” evidence, all point to Bishop being responsible, jurors were told.

Bishop, now aged 52, has denied two charges of murder. The trial continues.